


The Library

by celticvampriss



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: AU, F/M, jeankasa - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-05-24
Updated: 2015-05-23
Packaged: 2018-03-31 23:03:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,107
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3996457
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/celticvampriss/pseuds/celticvampriss
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Prompt: Librarian/Avid Reader AU</p><p>Mikasa is a part of the mysterious Great Library.  Jean is the boy she can't seem to remember.  He has been coming to the Great Library for years, spending hours looking through books, jotting in a notebook, and yet whenever they meet, to her, it's like the first time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Library

He came at odd times.  According to the rest of the staff, he was there every day for hours, pouring over books with dark rimmed glasses hanging down his nose.  He’d fall asleep amidst the pages.  He’d read until the candles had burned so low they couldn’t have still been useful for reading.  

And the notebooks.  He filled them up.  One after another.  Ink staining his fingertips.  

This is what they told her when he strolled into the Great Library, cloak fluttering behind him and a bag strap across his shoulder.  It was rainy that day, cold.  Mikasa knew because everyone who came in was either damp or huddled into their coats.  Her eyes followed the boy, in his late teens they had guessed, as she continued with her questions.

“What’s his name?”

“Jean, I think.”  Answered the Head Librarian.  A spirit of blue and silver, more ghost than corporeal at this stage of her death.  Centuries she had passed as a servant of the library.

“And why does he come here?  What does he read?”

“All sorts of things.  Never stays in the same section for too long, always moving around, writing in that notebook.”  The Head Librarian spared Mikasa a glance, though the look went unnoticed by the girl.

Mikasa would not say, but his face had sparked a memory.  All her memories were sparse, but she knew his face.  She was sure of it.  “I’ll go and tend to the upper stacks.”  Mikasa said, after seeing the boy walk up the stairs.

“Very well.”  

Mikasa moved in that direction.

“And Mikasa?”

“Yes?”

“He’s a magician.  You know the policy for magicians.”

Mikasa nodded.  She knew very few things at all, but she knew the Great Library’s policies like they had been etched into her subconscious.

On the upper floor, Mikasa found her magician sitting sprawled on the carpet balancing a book on his knee.  When she drew near, he did not notice.  She made no sound and drew no breath for him to sense.

“Are you in need of any assistance?”  Mikasa started with the generic question that she was inclined to ask any patron of the Library.

He looked up, now with glasses over his golden eyes.  His smile was immediate and it gave her pause.  “Mikasa.  How are you?”  He was almost breathless with asking, an excitement coming over him she couldn’t understand.

“You know my name?”

His cheek fell onto the knuckles of his fist while that smile quirked into a cheeky grin.  “‘Course I know your name.  And every night, I tell you mine.”

“I know your name.”  She said.  “Jean.”

His cheek slipped off his hand.  “What?”

She did not answer.

“You remember me?  You know who I am?”  He was crawling over his selected books toward her, hope falling off him in waves.  Mikasa moved backward from it.  “Mikasa?”

“I didn’t know.  I asked.”  She said, and his disappointment was crushing.  

“Oh.”  He sat back down and resolve settled over him.  He picked up his book and went back to reading.  

Mikasa left him.  She saw to her duties and finished her work quickly.  She passed his spot often, sending looks his way and then hastily moving on.  Curiosity gripped her.  She wanted to know what he was doing.  She _had_ to know.  Somehow, she felt she already knew.

Mikasa passed through books and shelving and people, gliding on the edge of his space until she was beside him.  He did not notice.  She leaned in close and he shivered, making her draw back, but he kept reading.  As she watched his eyes dance back and forth over the words behind his glasses, he abruptly picked up his notebook and started to write.  Mikasa moved to where the could see over his shoulder and tried to read, but his handwriting was illegible.  Sloppy, slanted letters all crushed together with the rush of his thoughts.  She frowned.

“You could just ask me.”  He said, grinning.  “I don’t mind showing you what I’m reading.”

Mikasa tried to look affronted, but she had no real feelings left anymore.  It was just a shell.  All of her.  Just spirit and consciousness.  He tipped up the cover of the book so she could read it.  

“This is a book on souls.”  She said.

His grin became crooked again.  “I’ve got a very important mission.  I need books like these to help me figure it out.”

Her eyes were captured completely by his face.  The lazy arrogance of his eyes, that teasing smile, she felt he knew a lot of things.  A lot of things that he was keeping secret.  From her.  But most of all she found him intriguing.  “What mission?”

For the briefest second his eyes sobered, a melancholy taking its place, but he was quick to recover.

“If you see any more books like this one, let me know.”  He said, getting back into the words.  

Mikasa let him.  It was a long time before he left.  He read until he was almost dozing where he sat.  Then he removed his glasses, stuffed them in a pocket, and began to return his books to their shelves.  He adjusted the cloak over his strong shoulders and waved to her.  Mikasa waved back.

As the hours slipped into the next day, Mikasa fell back into her duties with no thought of the mysterious boy whatsoever.

The following day, Mikasa’s attention was captured again, though she did not know why.  She hovered near the front desk, watching him walk into the library bold as anything, with choppy ash blond hair flying around his head.  “Ma’am?”  Mikasa asked, earning the attention of the Head Librarian.  “Who is that boy?”  As she asked, he settled at a table and took out his glasses and a barely held together notebook.

Days passes as the boy slipped in and out of Mikasa’s notice.  She felt somewhere that she remembered him.  She started to see his face when he was not there, to remember.  But it wasn’t until he had called to her breathlessly that she knew why.

She went to the dark corner that he had used to call her over.  “Yes?  Are you in need of any assistance?”

Jean shook his head.  “No.  Listen.  I think I’ve found it.”

“Found what?”  She could not help but be pulled in, to whisper with conspiracy the way he was.

His grin did not slant into a smirk, but remained genuine.  He looked ready to reach out to her, but that was not in Library Policy.  Patrons did not touch the librarians.  She remembered the comment about his being a magician.  There was a policy about them as well.

Jean rubbed his fingers together, sparks igniting in his excitement.  Mikasa wanted to overlook it.  “There is no magic allowed in the Library.”  She declared automatically.

He stopped.  “I know.  I know.”  He ran his fingers through his hair, mussing it up without a thought.  “Listen.  I’ll be back.  Just…I need a bit of time.  This is going to take a lot of work, but I found it.”  His mouth moved, numbers tracking through his thoughts.  “And just in time.  I was beginning to worry.”

And he was gone.

Mikasa didn’t know how long he was away.  That night, she forgot the exchange completely.  It had slipped from her mind the harder she tried to recall it.  His face stayed, but she didn’t know a name to place with it.  Only a smile and kind eyes behind thick framed glasses.

Again, he came to her in secret.  When she met him away from other patrons, he held up a vial.

“Drink this.”

“I can’t.”  She said, looking down at her shimmering form.  She couldn’t drink.  Or eat.  Or breathe.  Or live.

He smirked at her, hooking his thumb in his belt.  “Yes, you can.  Just take it.”

She looked at the vial and then back at his confident face.  “I can’t take things from Patrons that are not Library property.”

Jean rolled his eyes.  “Geez, these rules are a pain in the ass.  Can you really not just reach out and take this?”

She shook her head.

“Um, can I pour it into your mouth?”  He winced.  “I don’t mean that to sound dirty.”

Mikasa frowned.  “I can’t drink anything.  Why is that so difficult to understand?  I’m a ghost.”  She was growing frustrated, which was strange, since she had no feelings that she could remember.

“No, you’re not.   _You_ are not a ghost, Mikasa.”

His words made no sense.  She knew what she was.  She knew very little, but she knew what she was.

Finally, he growled in frustration.  He looked around, finally plucking one of the thicker books off the shelf and turning it over to read the spine.  “ _1000 Ways to Enchant Your Love Life_ , perfect, no one’ll miss this garbage.”  He dug through his cloak and retrieved a knife.  

“What are you doing?”

“Just watch.”  He said, then he opened the book and stabbed down into the pages.  Mikasa screamed.  She lunged for the book, because it was Library property and no one was allowed to deface books in the Library.  It was a Policy.  But Jean dodged her.  He cut down into the pages, squirming away from her reach, and began tearing out a deep section from the middle.  The torn squares of the book fluttered at his feet, littering the carpet, and when she was ready once again to seize it from his hand he set the vial into the newly hacked out hole.

Mikasa’s fingers closed on the book.  He let go.  For a second, she did nothing but stare.  Everyone was staring.  The Head Librarian would surely be coming.  He would get in trouble, worse, he’d have to pay for his damage.  But she also noticed that the vial rested almost in her hands.  Through the book.

“Drink it, Mikasa.”  He urged her again.  He was insane.  Librarians were sweeping in from everywhere.  Jean was now fair game to their touch and his arms were pulled behind his back.  He was forced to his knees.

“Drink it.”  He said again, this time with desperation cracking his voice.  “Mikasa, I’ve been coming to this damn library for _years_.  Just so I could find that.  So _you_ could drink it.  You have to drink it.”

She shook her head lightly as activity swirled around her.  Jean was being dragged away.  He would have to pay for the damage.  The value of the book.  Which could be anywhere from a monetary fine, to removing his limbs, and even with his life.  It all depended on the value of the book.  Mikasa searched her knowledge of the Library for this book’s price.

But she could not focus.  She touched the vial with her fingertips.  Then she lifted it up and took out the stopper.  Drink it.  She trusted him and yet she didn’t know him.  His voice repeated again and again.  Her patience failed her, because something was pressing her to act.  Time was running out.

She looked up, but he was already gone.  Paying his price.  Mikasa lifted the vial to her lips.  And she drank.

Mikasa Ackerman had died.  Seven years ago along with her parents.  It had made all the papers, drew international attention.  The husband and wife murdered, their daughter’s body never recovered.  Seven years ago, Mikasa Ackerman had died, but she was not gone.  Her spirit had been bound to the Library.  Another Librarian to guard the volumes of millennia, the knowledge of the Great Library had to be kept.  But the magician that had trapped her had not done so cleanly.  Every night, her memories faded.  She couldn’t remember her curse or why she was there.  The Library had taken her in, sealed her physical body from the mortal plane where her spirit resided.  

And seven years ago a boy had come to the Great Library.  He was an apprentice magician and in his wandering of the aisles, had found a girl.  And as silent tears fell, she used the last day of her memory to tell him who she was.  Before her memories faded that night, for the first time, the boy had made the promise to help her.  

Mikasa felt the ground beneath her shoes again.  She breathed in the smell of old pages and dust.  She felt heat on her cheeks and cold air blow onto her skin.  She dropped everything, the book and the vial, and ran.  

She had to find the boy.  She had to find Jean.  Because now she would never forget him again.

**Author's Note:**

> Don't really know, just jotted this down off the top of my head. I have a few ideas for a possible follow up chapter. Maybe I'll get to it at some point.


End file.
